Saturday, November 4, 2017

What to Believe? Truth or Consequences in Religion and Politics

By Rudy
Barnes, Jr.

In
religion and politics, finding truth can be elusive, but the failure to distinguish
truth from falsehood has its consequences. In presenting his version of truth, President
Trump has denigrated traditional media sources with fake news. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God’s
truth is found in their holy scriptures.
That’s why those religions are called religions of the book.

St.
Augustine stated the conundrum of understanding and believing truth this way: Do not seek to understand so that you may
believe, but believe so that you may understand. Discovering God’s truth requires reason, but
reason alone is not enough. A leap of
faith is needed to bridge the gap between worldly reality, reason and the
ultimate truth, which can come in many forms.

There
are two categories of religious truths: the mystical and the moral. Mystical
truths relate to the ineffable nature of God.
They are ultimately speculative and known only by faith and
experience. Moral truths define our human relationships and come in the form of
voluntary moral standards of legitimacy or in coercive religious laws. Religious laws have no place in libertarian
democracies, and voluntary moral standards of legitimacy are subject to reason.

Thomas
Jefferson understood the distinction between mystical and moral matters of
faith, and asserted that only moral standards were relevant to our politics. In politics Jefferson considered the moral
teachings of Jesus “the most sublime moral code ever designed by man,” and he discounted
mystical religious beliefs “that don’t pick my pocket or break my leg.”

What is truth? (John 18:38) That rhetorical question of Pontius Pilate
has echoed down through the ages. Jesus
had earlier told his disciples: I am the
way, the truth and the life. No one
comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6; see commentary on these
verses at pp 330-331 and 416-417 of The Teachings of Jesus and Muhammad on
Morality and Law: The Heart of Legitimacy athttps://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3gvZV8mXUp-aTJubVlISnpQc1U/view).

John’s
Gospel is unique. It presents Jesus as
the mystical Logos, or Word of God
(John 1:1-18), and is more like a gospel of the Holy Spirit than of the man
Jesus. John 14:6 is problematic. If taken literally it supports exclusivist Christian
doctrine that limits salvation to those who believe in Jesus as God’s one and
only Son; but if considered the word of God (Logos), it can be considered a universal truth compatible with all
three religions of the book.

In
our democracy, the way, the truth and the
life taught by Jesus relates to our politics, and the new command to love one
another (John 13:34) summarizes the moral imperatives taught by Jesus. It complements the greatest commandment in the other three gospels to love God and
to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, including our neighbors of other races
and religions.

The
love command is considered a common word
of faith for all three religions of the book, and all three religions recognize
Jesus as a great prophet. If Christians
were to emphasize following the teachings of Jesus as the word of God rather
than worshipping Jesus as God, they could promote religious and political
reconciliation. Without a politics of
reconciliation based on shared moral values, continued polarization will likely
lead to the demise of our democracy.

If
we are truthful, we will acknowledge that truth and morality are relative and
we tend to believe whatever we want to believe; and the internet contributes to
that ambiguity by providing false truths that are congenial to every
viewpoint. But for those who are
sincerely seeking God’s truth, it begins with loving our neighbors—even those
we don’t like—as we love ourselves, and then struggling with its uncomfortable
applications in our social relations and politics.

God’s
truth can be problematic. Loving all
people requires that we protect them from those who would do them harm, and the
latest terrorist attack in New York illustrates the paradox. One dysfunctional hate-filled man has
reignited fear and hatred toward Muslims, but rooting out potential terrorists
requires the cooperation of all Muslims.
If hatred in the name of God is part of the problem, then love in the
name of God must be part of the solution.

The
truth is that our love for others is our only real defense against hate. God’s will is to reconcile and redeem
humanity in a flawed world, while Satan seeks to divide and conquer—and Satan
does a convincing imitation of God in the mosque, church and politics. The consequences of ignoring God’s truth are
dire: further religious and political polarization, hate and violence.

Kurt Andersen has a presented a
dire and fantastical picture of religion in Fantasyland: How America Went
Haywire, a 500-Year History (Random House, 2017). Andersen sees the Reformation as allowing
Protestants to reject the Vatican and start their own religion, then reject
that religion and “start their own new religions again and again.” Then “The Enlightenment liberated people to believe anything whatsoever…and in the
marketplace of ideas, [it was assumed that] reason would win.” Andersen asserts that reason never won this
religious and political free-for-all in the marketplace of ideas and the internet,
and he cites Emanuel Kant’s explanation that religion is burdened by questions
“it is not able to ignore, but which…it is also unable to answer.” Today fantastical doctrines of religion
circulated on the internet continue to trump more practical moral doctrines
(pages 52, 53). It should be noted that
Andersen’s book emphasizes the mystical side of religion and does not address
its moral imperatives.